The first few weeks Tommy had The Kiss, he’d been elated. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to procure (that’s how he thought of it when he was forced to assign a verb to his actions: procure). The sculpture had appeared on his very last day of working the pile at the World Trade Center site, early April 2002. By that time, Tommy had been working the pile for seven straight months, since the early hours of September twelfth. As a retired firefighter (his lower back had betrayed him once and for all years earlier), he was one of the first to be cleared to work rescue and recovery. The cough he’d developed somewhere around week six was only getting worse and his daughter Maggie was apoplectic about him going there every day.
“Ma would have hated this. She would’ve wanted you to take care of yourself, to be here for me and my sisters, for your grandchildren,” she’d say, pushing more and more food in front of him. She’d taken to feeding others (everyone except herself) with an alarming zeal over the past seven months. She’d cook all day, layering the freezer with pans of lasagna and enchiladas, containers of chili and homemade soup, more than the family could possibly eat. Her hands were in constant motion. If she wasn’t cooking, she was scrubbing a pot or polishing flatware or zealously wiping down counters as if she were eliminating scurvy from a dangerously filthy ship. The furrow between her eyes never disappeared now. She’d delivered his first grandchild three months earlier and had already dropped the pregnancy weight and then some; there was a new slackness to her jawline. Her pretty brown eyes, always so engaged and eager, were often watery and bloodshot and unfocused. “You’re working yourself into your grave,” Maggie told her father.
“Poor choice of words,” Tommy said, trying to keep his voice light instead of bitter.
“You know what I mean, Dad.”
Tommy knew. He showed up at the pile every day because it was his wife’s grave, as much of a grave as she’d ever have anyway. Ronnie had been an office manager for a financial services company on the ninety-fifth floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. Before the planes hit that morning, Tommy and Ronnie had passed each other in the outdoor concourse between buildings, as they did many days when Tommy was heading home from the occasional late-night security guard shift and Ronnie was arriving. She was supposed to be off that Tuesday but had decided to go in and help her boss clear out a backlog of files.
“I’ll take an extra day next week,” she’d told Tommy. “I’ll enjoy it more if I get this work out of the way.” They’d kissed in the lobby, talked about what to do for dinner. “Load the dishwasher,” she’d said, giving him a little squeeze on his upper arm.
“Roger,” he’d said. She’d smiled and rolled her eyes a little; they both knew he’d forget. He was tired after working all night but not too tired to notice her short skirt, how fine and high her ass looked beneath the center seam of the gray wool, how shapely and firm her legs were after three daughters and, soon, a grandson.
Through the excruciating hours and days and weeks following that morning, he’d thought repeatedly about that moment: Ronnie’s long, strong stride in the bright morning sun, how those legs should have carried her down to safety, how he should have been there to catch her. He remembered the shoes she wore that day, red patent leather with a little cutout for the toes. She always wore sneakers to commute from their house in the Rockaways, but would stop in the concourse lobby to slip on her heels. She cared about things like that.
“Appearances count,” she would tell their kids. “If you want people to judge you based on the inside, don’t distract them from the outside.”
His eyes had followed her that morning as she’d walked to the elevators. He would always be grateful for that, at least, how he’d stopped and admired the little sway of her derriere, watched her swipe her employee ID, press the up button for the elevator, gently tug at the hem of her skirt. How his heart had softened thinking what a fierce specimen of a woman she was, how lucky that she belonged to him.